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I announced to you that today I would speak to you about that to which, by exception, I have given a title, and which is called the paternal metaphor. Not very long ago—a little worried, I imagine, about the turn I was going to give things—someone asked me:

“What do you intend to speak to us about for the rest of the year?”
And I answered:
“I intend to tackle questions of structure.”

In this way, I did not compromise myself. Nevertheless, that is indeed what I intend to talk to you about this year concerning the formations of the unconscious, questions of structure, that is to say… to put things simply… questions that attempt to put things in place, the things you talk about every day and in which you also get tangled up every day in a way that eventually no longer even bothers you.

The paternal metaphor, then, is something that will concern the examination of the function of the father—if you will, as one would say—in terms of inter-human relations and precisely the complications you encounter, I mean: every day, in the way you might make use of it, make use of it as a concept, as something that has even taken on a certain familiar turn over the time you have been talking about it. And it is precisely a matter of knowing whether you speak of it in the form of a truly coherent discourse.

This function of the father has its place in the history of analysis, even quite a large place. It is at the heart of the question, needless to say, of the Oedipus. Therefore, in the history of analysis, it is around the place given to the Oedipus complex that you see it made present. FREUD introduced it right at the beginning. The Oedipus complex appears with The Interpretation of Dreams. What the unconscious reveals there at the outset is first and foremost the Oedipus complex.

The importance of the revelation of the unconscious is infantile amnesia concerning what? Concerning the fact of infantile desires for the mother and the fact that these desires are repressed, that is to say that not only have they been repressed, but it has been forgotten that these desires are primordial, forgotten not only that they are primordial but that they are always there. One must not forget that it is from there that analysis started and that it is around this that a certain number of questions introduced by the clinic have arisen.

I have tried to arrange for you a certain number of directions of the questions that have been raised in the history of analysis regarding the Oedipus. The first constitutes a milestone: it is when the question arose of whether this Oedipus complex, which had at first been promoted as fundamental in the neurosis on which FREUD’s work had patently demonstrated the author’s thinking by making the Oedipus complex something universal, that is to say not only in the neurotic but also in the normal, and for good reason: it is that this Oedipus complex, if it fails in neurosis, it fails by virtue of the fact that it is essential in a normalizing function, that it is an accident of the Oedipus which provokes neurosis. This first question, around which I can center one of the poles of the history of analysis concerning the Oedipus complex, is this: are there neuroses without Oedipus?

It seemed indeed that certain observations presented themselves in such a way that the conflict, the Oedipal drama, had not played the essential role, that, for example, the exclusive relationship of the child to the mother was what was given in the analysis as what must be accepted by virtue of experience, namely that there could be subjects who presented neuroses in which no trace of Oedipus could be found at all. “Neurosis without Oedipus” is the title of an article by Charles ODIER.

This notion of neurosis without Oedipus, you know that in history it is essentially correlated to the questions raised about what has been called the maternal superego: is the superego only, as FREUD already, at the moment he asked himself this question of the Neurosis without Oedipus, had formulated it at that moment, namely is the superego of paternal origin? The question was raised: is there not, behind the paternal superego, this maternal superego even more demanding, even more oppressive, even more devastating, even more insistent, in neurosis, than the paternal superego? I do not want to dwell on this at length, we have a long way to go.

The other center around which this is organized is the center of the Oedipus, I mean the cases of exception and the relationship between the paternal superego and the maternal superego. At that time, there was the open question of whether a whole field of our pathology, the pathology that comes under our jurisdiction, that is offered to us, for our treatment, our care, could not be referred—independently of the question whether the Oedipus complex is present, or whether it is absent in a subject—to what we shall call the pre-Oedipal field.

If there is Oedipus, if this Oedipus is considered as representing a phase, if there is maturity at a certain essential moment of the subject’s development, it is always there, this Oedipus. What FREUD himself quickly put forward, in the early moments of his work, five years after The Interpretation of Dreams, I mean everything that comes back from the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, was of a nature to make us understand that what happens before Oedipus also has its importance.

Of course, in FREUD, it takes its importance only inasmuch as it takes its importance through the Oedipus. But already, or more exactly, never, never at that time, was the notion of retroaction, of a Nachträglichkeit[afterwardness], of Oedipus, on which you know I always insistently focus your attention here, ever emphasized.

It is something that seems to escape the thought of the demands of the temporal past of thought. From the moment that there were things that were before the Oedipus, and if certain parts of our field especially relate to what happened in our field of experience, in this field of the subject’s development, there was therefore indeed a question that arose about the pre-Oedipal stages as such and about their relationships, with what? You know:

– on the one hand, perversion.

It is the primary state, if I may say so, the fallow state for some, of the notion of perversion. Thank God, we are no longer quite there, but for a certain time nevertheless—and at the beginning it was legitimate since it was only an approximation of the question, less so now—perversion was essentially considered as something whose etiology, whose cause, was to be specifically referred to the pre-Oedipal field. It was because of an abnormal fixation that perversion acquired its conditioning, its root. That is why, moreover, perversion was therefore only “the inverted neurosis,” or more exactly—the neurosis not having been inverted, the neurosis remained latent—what in neurosis had been inverted, in perversion became apparent: the unconscious was there in the open, what concerned perversion had not been repressed as it had not passed through the Oedipus. It is a conception at which no one stops anymore. This does not mean, however, that we are more advanced, but I point out to you, I indicate that around, then, the question of the pre-Oedipal field are located:

– on the one hand, the question of perversion,

– and on the other hand, the question of psychosis.

All things can be illuminated for us now in various ways. For the moment, it is simply a matter of situating for you in which area, in which angle of interest, questions may arise around the Oedipus. It is always—in perversion, as in psychosis—a question of the imaginary function, of imaginary relationships. Even without being specially introduced to the handling we make of it here for everyone, anyone can see that it is about imaginary relationships, precisely in the sense that what concerns the image especially, as much in perversion as in psychosis, and of course from different angles:

– one thing is an invasion more or less endophasic, made up of words more or less heard[psychosis],

– another thing is the cumbersome, parasitic character of an image in a perversion.

But it is indeed, in both cases, a matter of pathological manifestations in which it is through the image that the field of reality is profoundly disturbed. And this is attested to us by the history of analysis. It is therefore in a certain relationship with the Oedipus as such, since it is especially in the pre-Oedipal field that experience and the concern for coherence, the way theory is made, stands firm.

It would be precisely for this reason that, in short, the field of reality, inasmuch as it is disturbed, in certain cases profoundly, by the invasion of the imaginary… it seems that it is a term which, there, is more useful than the term “fantasy,” for it would be inappropriate to speak equally of psychoses and perversions… in this sense, in the sense of exploring the pre-Oedipal field, you have a whole direction of analysis that has developed, to the point of even saying that it is in this direction that all essential progress has been made since FREUD.

And I would like to point out to you that this paradox, I mean the essentially paradoxical character in what we are addressing today, is constituted by the testimony of the work of Mrs. Melanie KLEIN. In a work, as in any production in words, there are two levels: there is what she says, what she formulates in her discourse as such, and what she means, because in their meaning, separating the “means” and the “say,” there is her intention.

And then it seems that we would not be analysts, as I try to make things understood here, if we did not know that she sometimes says a little more beyond that. It is even usually in this that our approach consists: it is to see what she says beyond what she intends to say. The work of Melanie KLEIN says things which are moreover of all importance, which sometimes—simply by their text—contain their own internal contradiction, by that very fact alone that they can be subject to certain criticisms that have been made.

Then there is also what she says without intending to say it. And one of the most striking things at this point is that this woman who has brought us such profound, such illuminating views on what happens, not only in the pre-Oedipal time, but on the children she examines, whom she analyzes at a presumably pre-Oedipal stage… I mean, by a first approximation of the theory and to the extent that she addresses in these children themes such that the Oedipus is as much behind, necessarily, as at the moment she addresses them, since it is often in “verbal” or “pre-verbal” terms in history that she addresses them, almost at the appearance of speech, finally, shortly after… it is quite striking that it is precisely to the extent that she goes back further to the time of the so-called pre-Oedipal history that she always and constantly sees a permanence of the Oedipal question there.

If you read that article of hers concerning precisely the Oedipus, you will see with surprise that she admits, and she even shows us by unequivocal testimonies from her experience with children’s drawings, extremely valuable, where it is precisely at the stage called the formation of bad objects, at the stage where it is inside the mother’s body, which seems, to hear her, to play the predominant role in the evolution of the first object relation in the child, where the child is entirely centered on this inside of the mother’s body and even, at a stage prior to the so-called “paranoid” phase—the very precise phase which is linked to the appearance of the mother’s body in its entirety—it is at an even earlier phase that, based on drawings, on utterances, on a whole reconstruction of the child’s psychology at this stage, Mrs. Melanie KLEIN attests for us the presence of bad objects in the mother’s body, among which, as you know, there are all the rivals, the bodies of brothers, of sisters, past, present and future, and there is quite precisely the father represented in the form of his penis.

That is indeed something that deserves our attention at the moment of the relations of the imaginary function, in the earliest stages to which the properly schizophrenic, generally psychotic functions, and the Oedipus, may be attached. It is curious, in fact, to arrive at this contradiction in an intention which is that of Mrs. Melanie KLEIN to go first to explore the pre-Oedipal states: the further back she goes, the more she finds herself on the imaginary level, the more she observes the precocity—precocity, if we stick to a purely historical notion of the Oedipus, very difficult to explain—the precocity of the appearance of the paternal ternary term, and this from the very first imaginary phases of the child. It is in this sense that I say that the work says more than it means to say.

So there are two terms, two poles already defined in this evolution of interest around the Oedipus:

– that which concerned first, as we have said, the question of the superego and neuroses without Oedipus,
– and then, what centers the question of the Oedipus around the acquisition, or more exactly the disturbances, which occur in the field of reality.

A third stage, which deserves no fewer remarks and which will open our next chapter, is the relationship of the Oedipus complex with something which is not the same thing: with genitalization, as it is expressed. The Oedipus complex, let us not forget, amid so many explorations, questions, discussions, this has almost passed into history to the second level but remains always implicit in all clinics, the Oedipus complex has a normative function, not simply in the moral structure of the subject nor in his relations, but in the assumption of his sex.

That is to say, something which in analysis, as you know, always remains in a certain ambiguity. There is the properly genital function, and this function is obviously the object of maturation, of maturation as such.

It is implicated as fundamental in the analysis of a first phase, the first ascent of maturation which is properly organic and takes place in childhood. The question of the link of this first sexual drive, for which, as you know, an organic, I mean anatomical, support has been sought, for example in the double drive, and which takes place at the level of the testicles in the formation of spermatozoa, the question of the relation between this and the existence in the human species of the Oedipus complex, has remained a phylogenetic question over which much obscurity hovers, to the point that no one would risk writing articles on the subject anymore. But after all, that has nonetheless been present in the history of analysis.

The question then of “genitalization” is twofold: on the one hand, it is that which involves an evolution, a maturation, and on the other hand, it involves in the Oedipus something which is realized, which is the assumption by the subject of his own sex, to call things by their name, which is the fact that the man assumes the virile type, that the woman assumes a certain feminine type, recognizes herself as a woman, identifies herself with her functions as a woman. Virility and feminization, these are the two terms which are essentially the function of the Oedipus. I must say that here we are at the level where the Oedipus is directly linked to the function of the ego ideal. There is no other meaning.

Here then are the three chapters in which you can classify everything that has taken place as discussions around the Oedipus, and at the same time around the function of the father, for it is one and the same thing. There is no question: if there is no father, there is no Oedipus. And conversely, to speak of Oedipus is to introduce as essential the function of the father.

So, for those who are taking notes, on the historical subject of the evolution of the Oedipus complex, everything revolves around three chapters: in relation to the superego, in relation to reality, in relation to the ego ideal.

The ego ideal, on every occasion bearing genitalization as it is assumed, as it becomes an element of the ego ideal. Reality, heading of a chapter, implies the relations of the Oedipus with the conditions that involve an upheaval of the relation to reality: perversion and psychosis.

Now, let us try to go a little further: it is clear that here, in the third chapter, namely around what concerns the function of the Oedipus as it directly affects this assumption of sex, the whole question of the castration complex in what is not so much elucidated, this is where we are going to move forward.

In any case, then, these massive, global relations, underlined by history, being sufficiently present for everyone, we will now ask ourselves: So, and the father? What was the father doing during that time? In what way is the father involved in the matter?

It is a real observation concerning each subject. The question of the absence or presence of the father, of the beneficial or harmful character of the father is, as you know, certainly not a hidden question. We have even recently seen the appearance of the term “paternal deficiency,” it was not to tackle a minor subject.

The question of whether what has been said about it stands up is another question. But still, this “paternal deficiency,” whether it is called so or not, is in some sense a subject on the agenda, precisely and above all in an evolution of analysis that becomes more and more environmentalist, as is elegantly said.

That is to say, what is it about? Naturally not all analysts fall into this error, thank God! Many analysts to whom you will provide biographical information as interesting as telling them: “But the parents did not get along, there was marital discord, that explains everything!” will answer you—even those with whom we do not always agree—will say: “So what! That proves absolutely nothing, we should not expect any particular effect.”

In which they are right. That being said, when one is looking, what is one interested in concerning the father? When one wants to speak of paternal deficiency, it will group itself on the biographical register, so to speak: Was the father there or was he not there? Did he travel, was he absent? Did he come back often?

Questions that represent the absence of the father: can an Oedipus complex be constituted in a normal way when there is no father, for example? These are certainly very interesting questions in themselves, and I would say more, it is by this that, in sum, the first paradoxes were introduced, those that led to the subsequent questions. It was realized that it was not so simple, that an Oedipus complex could very well be constituted even when the father was not there.

At the very beginning, it was always believed that it was by some excess, so to speak, an excessive presence of the father, that all the dramas arose at the time when the image of the terrifying father was considered as the injurious element. In neurosis, it was quickly realized that it was even more serious when he was too kind!

These schools were established slowly, and it is within this that I am now speaking to you more or less about the question of where things stand today, and it is within this that I will try to bring a bit of order to see where the paradoxes lie.

We are now at the other end, questioning ourselves about “paternal deficiencies”: there are what are called weak fathers, submissive fathers, fathers dominated, fathers emasculated by their wives, finally handicapped fathers, blind fathers, crippled fathers, whatever you like. One should nevertheless try to see what emerges from such a situation. We are trying to find minimal formulas that allow us to make progress. First, the question of his presence or absence, I mean concrete presence.

If we place ourselves precisely at the level at which this research is conducted, that is, at the level of reality—that is what is called the environment, as an element of the environment, so to speak—it can be said that it is entirely possible, conceivable, realized, and accessible to experience, that he is there even when he is not there. This alone should already prompt us to a certain prudence concerning the function of the father, when handling things from a purely and simply environmentalist point of view.

Oedipus complexes that are entirely normal, normal in both senses: normal as normalizing, on the one hand, and also normal as denormalizing, I mean by their neurotic effect, for example, are established in a way exactly homogeneous to other cases, even in cases where the father is not there, I mean when the child has been left alone with his mother. First thing that should attract our attention.

Concerning deficiency, I would simply like to point out that when the father is deficient, insofar as we speak of deficiency, one never knows in what, because: if in some cases it is said that he is too kind, that would seem to mean that he should be mean! On the other hand, the fact that, obviously, he can be too mean implies that it might sometimes be better to be kind!

In the end, for a long time, this little round has been made. The problem of his deficiency has been glimpsed not in a direct way, directly concerning the subject, the child in question but, as was obvious from the very start, it is as a member of the fundamental trio, the ternary, of the family, that is, as holding his place in the family, that one could begin to say somewhat more effective things concerning deficiency. But they have not, for all that, been better formulated.

I do not want to dwell on this at length, but we already talked about it last year in relation to little Hans: we saw the difficulties we had from the environmentalist point of view alone in precisely determining what this deficiency of a character who was far from being deficient consisted in.

We will be able to go further, in the sense that the character was far from being deficient in his family: he was there, near his wife, he played his role, he discussed, he let himself be sent packing by his wife now and then, but in any case he took care of the child a lot, he was not absent, and so little absent that he even had his child analyzed. That is the best perspective one could hope for from a father, at least in that sense.

I believe that this question of the deficiency of the father, we will come back to it, but here one enters into such a shifting world that we must try to make the distinction that allows us to see where the research is failing. The research fails not because of what it finds, but because of what it is looking for. I believe the fault of orientation is this: it is that two things are confused, which are related but do not coincide, it is the relation to the father as normative, with the father as normal.

Of course, the father can be denormalizing inasmuch as he himself is not normal, but that is to shift the question to the level of the neurotic or psychotic structure of the father. So, the question of the normal father is one question, the question of his normal position in the family is another, and this other question still does not coincide—that is the third point I am putting forward, which is important—with an exact definition of his normative role.

Because I tell you this: to speak of his deficiency in the family is not to speak of his deficiency in the complex. Because, to speak of his deficiency in the complex, one must introduce another dimension than the realistic dimension, so to speak, the one defined by the characterological, biographical, or other mode of his presence in the family. This is the direction in which we will take the next step.

Let us now come to the remarks, to the reminders that may allow us to introduce more correctly the question of the father’s role. If it is his place in the complex in which we can find the direction in which to move forward, the direction to pose a correct formulation, let us now question the complex and begin by recalling it from the beginning, from the basics.

At the beginning, as I told you: the terrible father. All the same, the image sums up something much more complex, as the name indicates. The father intervenes on several levels. He forbids the mother, first of all. That is the foundation, the principle of the Oedipus complex, it is there that the father is linked to the primordial law, the law of the prohibition of incest. It is the father, we are reminded, who is charged with representing this prohibition. He sometimes has to manifest it directly, if the child lets himself go to his expansions, to his manifestations, to his inclinations. But it is well beyond that that he exercises this role: it is by his whole presence, by his effects in the unconscious, that he exercises this prohibition of the mother.

You are waiting for me to say “under threat of castration.” That is true. It is true, it must be said, but it is not so simple. Granted, castration enters into a clearly manifest role, and one which, moreover, will be more and more confirmed. The link between castration and the Law is essential, but let us see how this is presented to us clinically, how first the Oedipus complex presents itself to us. I am obliged to remind you of this because it must evoke in you all sorts of textual recollections.

The relation—let us take first the boy—between the child and the father is commanded, of course, by the fear of castration. This fear of castration, what is it? How, from which end do we approach it? First, in the first experience of the Oedipus complex, in the form—of what?—of a retaliation.

I mean that it is within the aggressive relation, inasmuch as this aggression starts from the child, from the boy, inasmuch as his privileged object, the mother, is forbidden to him, it is inasmuch as the aggression is directed toward the father that the child—therefore on the imaginary level, in the dual relation—insofar as he imagines in the father aggressive intentions equivalent to or reinforced in relation to his own, but whose origin is in his own aggressive tendencies. In short, the fear experienced in front of the father is clearly centrifugal, I mean that it has its center in the subject. This is consistent both with experience and with the history of analysis.

It is from this perspective that, very quickly, experience has taught us that the incidence of the fear experienced in the Oedipus with regard to the father should be measured. Castration, then, inasmuch as:

– on the one hand, it is deeply linked to the symbolic articulation of the prohibition of incest,

– and on the other hand, and in the foreground of all our experience, much more so, of course, in those who are its privileged objects, namely the neurotics, is something that manifests itself on the imaginary level where it has, there, an origin which is not of the order of commandment, that is to say, as the Law of MANU says: “He who sleeps with his mother will cut off his genitals and, holding them in his hand—right or left, I do not remember very well—will go straight to the West until death ensues.”

That is the Law. But this law has not especially reached the ears of our neurotics as such. It is even generally left rather in the shadows. There are other ways of getting out of it, by the way, but I do not have time to elaborate on that today. So, it is linked to the subject’s imaginary aggression, the way neurosis takes shape: this castrative threat is a retaliation. Insofar as JUPITER is entirely capable of castrating CHRONOS, our little JUPITERS fear that CHRONOS himself will start by doing the job.

And then, there is something else that the examination of the Oedipus complex brings us from the start, I mean the way it is articulated, presented by experience, by theory, by FREUD. It is the delicate question of the inverted Oedipus.

I do not know if this seems self-evident to you, but read FREUD’s article or any article by any author: every time the question of the Oedipus is addressed, one is always struck by the extremely shifting, nuanced, disconcerting role played by the function of the inverted Oedipus. This inverted Oedipus is never absent from the function of the Oedipus, I mean that the component of love for the father cannot be eluded; it is what brings about the end of the Oedipus complex, the decline of the Oedipus complex. It is in a dialectic that remains very ambiguous, of love and identification, that is, of identification as taking its root in love, while not being the same thing. It is not the same thing, nevertheless the two terms are closely connected and absolutely inseparable.

Read the article that FREUD wrote on the decline of the complex, in the explanation he gives of the terminal identification that is its solution: it is to the extent that the father is loved that the subject identifies with him and finds the solution, the outcome of the Oedipus: on the one hand, in this composition of amnesic repression, and on the other hand, this acquisition in him of this ideal term thanks to which he becomes a father. He too can become someone who—I am not saying right now and immediately—is a little male who, so to speak, already has his credentials in his pocket, the matter in reserve. When the time comes, if things go well—if the little pigs do not eat him—at the moment of puberty, he has his penis all ready with his certificate: “Papa is there to have bestowed it on me, at the right time.” It does not happen like that if neurosis breaks out because there is something not quite regular with the said credentials.

Only the inverted Oedipus is not so simple either: it is by this route, and by this route of love, that the position properly called inversion can occur, that is to say that the subject also finds himself by the same route, on occasion, not in a beneficial identification, but in a good little passive position on the unconscious level, which will also reappear at the right time, that is, which will put him in this sort of angle bisector, squeeze-panic[being caught between two possibilities], so that he finds himself caught in a position he has discovered all by himself and which is quite advantageous:

This father who is formidable, who has forbidden so many things but who is very kind elsewhere, it is a matter of putting oneself in the right place to have his favors, that is, to make oneself loved by him. But as making oneself loved by him quite apparently consists, first of all, in moving to the rank of woman and one always keeps one’s little masculine self-esteem… this is what FREUD explains to us: making oneself loved by the father carries the danger of castration, whence this form of unconscious homosexuality which puts the subject in this essentially conflictual position, with multiple repercussions and which is: on the one hand, the perpetual return of the homosexual position with regard to the father, and on the other hand, its suspension, that is to say, its repression due to the threat of castration it entails.

All this is not simplistic, simplistic. Now what we are trying to do is to approach something that allows us to conceive it in a more rigorous way, which will entail that we can subsequently, with every observation and every particular case, pose our questions better and more rigorously.

So, summary. As earlier, the summary will consist in introducing a certain number of distinctions which, I believe, are the prelude to centering on the point that does not fit. Earlier already we had approached this: that it was there, around the ego ideal, that the question had not been posed. Here, let us also try to carry out the reduction we have just recalled and approached. I propose this to you: already now, I believe it is not too much to say that the father arrives here nevertheless in the position of a troublemaker, not simply cumbersome by his volume, but in the position of a troublemaker because he forbids.

He forbids what? Let us resume and distinguish: he forbids first of all the real satisfaction of the drive. If we are to bring into play the appearance of the genital drive, let it not be there, since it seems to intervene beforehand. But it is also clear that something is articulated around the fact that he forbids the little child to make use of his penis at the moment when the said penis begins to manifest what we will call its inclinations. It is the relationship of the father’s prohibition to the real drive.

Let us immediately make a remark at this level: why the father? Experience proves that the mother does it just as well. Recall the observation of little Hans. The mother says to him: “Put that away, that is not done.” And even, it is most often the mother who says:

“If you continue to do that, we will call the doctor who will cut it off.”

So, let us clearly point out what is happening: it is that the father, insofar as he forbids at the level of the real drive, is not so essential. Then, if you remember my chart from last year—you see, it always ends up being useful—let us return to what I brought you, the three-level chart: castration, frustration, privation.

Agent	Lack	Object
Real father	Symbolic castration	Imaginary phallus
Symbolic mother	Imaginary frustration	Real breast
Imaginary father	Real privation	Symbolic phallus

What is it about? I draw your attention: it is about the real intervention of the father, concerning what? An imaginary threat. Because it is quite clear that it is rather rare that it is actually cut off. So we indeed find what happens precisely at the level of the threat of castration.

I would point out to you that castration is a symbolic act whose agent is someone real, the father or the mother who says to him: “We’re going to cut it off,” and whose object is an imaginary object. If the child feels cut off, it is because he imagines it.

Now, I point out to you, this is paradoxical. Because you might say to me:

“That is strictly the level of castration, and you say that the father is not all that useful.”

That is exactly what I am saying. Yes!

On the other hand, what does the father forbid? Well, the point from which we started, namely: the mother, as object, she belongs to him, she does not belong to the child. It is on this level that, at least at one stage, in both the boy and the girl, this rivalry with the father is established, which alone generates aggression.

It is that the father really does frustrate the child of the mother. Here is another stage, another level if you will: I would point out to you that here the father then intervenes as someone who has the right and not as a real person, namely that even if he is not there, if he calls the mother on the phone, for example, the result is the same. Here it is the father, as symbolic, who intervenes in a frustration, an imaginary act concerning a real object, which is the mother as the child needs her.

Then there is the third term which intervenes in this articulation of the Oedipus complex, which is the father insofar as he makes himself preferable to the mother, for this dimension, you are absolutely obliged to introduce it in the terminal function, in that which results in the formation of the ego ideal. It is insofar as the father becomes—by whatever side, strength or weakness—a preferable object to the mother, that the terminal identification will be able to be established.

The question of the inverted Oedipus complex and its function is established at this level. I would say more: it is even here that the very important question of the difference of the effect of the complex on the boy and on the girl is centered. It is quite obvious that, at this level, it goes without saying for the girl, and that is why it is said that the function “castration complex” is asymmetrical for the boy and for the girl:

– for the girl, it is at the beginning that this question is important and at the end it facilitates the solution, because the father has no trouble making himself preferable to the mother as bearer of the phallus.

– For the boy, it is another matter, and you see, it is always there that the gap remains open.

That is to say, in order to be preferred to the mother insofar as it is through this that the resolution of the Oedipus complex occurs, well, we are confronted with the same difficulty in the establishment of the inverted Oedipus complex, and it does indeed seem to us that for the boy, the Oedipus complex must always and in any case be the least normative, whereas it is nevertheless implied that it is the most so, since it is through this identification with the father that, in the end, we are told virility is assumed.

In the end, the problem is to know how it happens that this father, who is essentially the prohibitor, does not here lead to what is the very clear conclusion of the third level, namely that it is in the occurrence of the ideal identification—that the father becomes the ego ideal—that something occurs.

Something that is what? That in any case tends to be for both boy and girl… but for the girl, what is beneficial is that she recognizes that she does not have a phallus, whereas for the boy, this would be an absolutely disastrous outcome, and sometimes it is… in other words, what we manage to center as the normative resolution point of the Oedipus produces, at a point and in a relationship such as: I → R → S [the agent I (Imaginary: the father), the lack R (Real: privation), the object S (Symbolic: the phallus)]

Agent	Lack	Object
Real father	Symbolic castration	Imaginary phallus
Symbolic father	Imaginary frustration	Real mother
Imaginary father	Real privation	Symbolic phallus

That is to say, the child recognizes not having chosen, he did not really choose what he has, as I have told you.

What happens at the level of ideal identification, the level where the father makes himself preferred to the mother, the essential point and the point of exit from the Oedipus, is something that must literally lead to privation even though all this is quite acceptable and quite conforming.

Still, this is never fully realized in the woman as the outcome of the Oedipus, for she always retains that little aftertaste—what is called Penisneid[penis envy]—which therefore proves that it does not really work rigorously. But in the case where it should work, if we stick to this schema, the boy, for his part, should always be castrated. So there is something off, something missing in our explanation.

Let us now try to introduce the solution. The solution is this: it is that the father, I am not saying in the family… in the family, he is whatever he wants, he is a shadow, he is a banker, he is whatever he needs to be, he is or he is not, that can be of great importance on occasion, but it can also matter not at all… the whole question is to know what he is in the Oedipus complex.

Well, the father is not a real object: even if he must intervene as a real object to give substance to castration, he is not a real object. So what is he? He is not only that ideal object either, because from that side of the object, only accidents can occur. Yet still, the Oedipus complex is not only a catastrophe, since it is the foundation and basis of our relation to culture, as is said.

So naturally, you will say to me: “The father is the symbolic father, you have already said that.” But if I had only that to repeat to you… I have said it enough already not to bring it to you today. What I am bringing you today, and what precisely allows us to bring a bit more precision to this notion of the symbolic father, is this: the father is a metaphor.

A metaphor, what is it? Let us say it right away to put it on the board, which will allow us to correct the awkward consequences of the diagram. A metaphor, as I have already explained to you, is a signifier that comes in the place of another signifier. I say:

“The father, in the Oedipus complex…
even if it may astonish the ears of some, I say exactly:
…the father is a signifier substituted for another signifier.”

And this is the lever, and the only essential lever of the father insofar as he intervenes in the Oedipus complex. And if it is not at this level that you look for paternal deficiencies, you will not find them anywhere else. The function of the father in the Oedipus complex is to be a signifier substituted for the signifier, that is, for the first signifier introduced in symbolization, the maternal signifier.

It is insofar as the father comes, according to the formula I once explained to you as that of the metaphor, comes in the place of the mother: S in the place of S’, which is the mother already bound to something that was x, that is to say, something that was the signified in the relationship of the child to the mother:

(S/S’).(S’/x) → S(1/s)

It is this mother who goes, who comes, because I am a little being already caught up in the symbolic. It is because I have learned to symbolize that one can say she goes, she comes. Otherwise, I feel her or I do not feel her. In the end, the world varies with her arrival and then can vanish.

The question is: where is the signified? “What does she want, that one? I would like it to be me that she wants, but it is quite clear that it is not only me she wants, there is something else at work in her.” What is at work in her is the x, it is the signified. In sum, to summarize last year’s seminar, the question is not in object relations: putting that at the center of object relations is sheer stupidity. The child is, himself, the partial object.

It is because he is first the partial object that he is led to ask himself: “What does it mean that she goes and comes?” This signified of the mother’s comings and goings is the phallus. The child, with more or less cleverness, more or less luck, can very early manage to become phallus once he has understood.

But the imaginary path is not the normal path, and it is precisely for this reason that it produces what are called fixations, and then it is not normal because, ultimately, as I will tell you, it is never pure, it is not completely accessible, it always leaves something approximate and unfathomable, even dual, which makes up all the polymorphism of perversion.

But by the symbolic path, that is, by the metaphorical path… I am stating this first, I will explain to you how afterward, because we cannot go faster, but I am stating to you right away, since we are reaching the end of today’s session, the schema that will serve us as a guide: …it is insofar as the father substitutes for the mother as signifier that this ordinary result of the metaphor will occur, the one expressed in the formula on the board. I am not telling you that I am presenting the solution here in a form already transparent, because I am presenting it to you in its final term, in its result, to show you where we are going.

We will now see how we get there and what use there is in having gotten there, that is, everything it resolves. So, we have a choice between two things:

– either I leave you there, with this blunt assertion in hand: the intervention of the father, I set it—and I claim that by this everything can be resolved—as being this: the substitution of one signifier for another signifier, and you will see the whole question of the impasses of the Oedipus become clear,

– or else I begin to explain the thing to you just a little.

I will introduce the thing to you, I will make a remark which—I hope—will nonetheless leave you the object for your dreams this week, since next time, to speak to you about the metaphor and its effect, I will have to tell you, to remind you, where it is situated, that is, in the unconscious.

I would like to point this out to you: there is something truly quite surprising, it is that the unconscious was not discovered earlier. Because of course, it has been there forever, and moreover, it is still there. It was necessary to know what happens inside to know that the place existed.

But I would simply like to give you something in the manner that you, who go through the world in the form, I hope, of apostles of my word, might introduce it—the question of the unconscious—to people who have never heard of it. You would say to them:

“How astonishing it is that since the world has been the world, none of these people who call themselves philosophers have ever thought of producing—at least in the classical period, now we are a bit more scattered but there is still a way to go—this essential dimension which is the one I have spoken to you about under the name of what can be called: something else!”

I have already told you, the desire for something else, one should still feel that it is often there, the desire for something else, not perhaps as you feel it for the moment, the desire to go eat a sausage rather than listen to me, but in any case and whatever it concerns, the desire for something else as such. Now this dimension is not only, simply, present in desire. I would just like to remind you that it is present in many other states that are absolutely constant, permanent.

Wakefulness, for example. What is called wakefulness. One does not think enough about that. To be awake, you will say to me…

What? Wakefulness is the thing, you know, that FREUD does in The Schreber Case.

It is indeed the type of thing that reveals to us to what extent FREUD lived in this “something else”: he speaks to us before sunrise, if you have referred to it, I have spoken to you about the day, the peace of the evening, and some other little things like that which have reached you more or less, it was all centered around this indication: before sunrise, is it really the sun that is going to appear?

It is something else that is latent: the moment of wakefulness that is awaited. And then, claustration. It is, after all, an absolutely essential dimension: as soon as a man arrives somewhere, in the jungle or in the desert, he immediately begins to shut himself in. If need be, as they say, he would take two windows with him to make a draught between them, even if that was all he had.

This claustration, it is also a completely essential dimension: it is about establishing an interior, and then it is not simply a notion of interior and exterior, it is the notion of the other, what is other as such, what is not the place where one is well sheltered. And I will say more: if you explored a little more deeply this phenomenology, as it is called, of claustration, you would realize to what extent it is absurd to limit the function of fear to what is called a relation with a real danger. The close connection of fear with security should be made clear to you in the most obvious way by the phenomenology of phobia.

You would notice that with the phobic, his moments of anguish are when he realizes he has lost his fear, at the moment when you begin to lift his phobia a little. It is at that moment that he says to himself:

“Oh dear! This is not going well, I no longer know which are the places where I must stop. In losing my fear, I have lost my security.”

And everything I said last year about little Hans.

There is a moment you do not think about enough, I am sure, because you live in it like your native air, so to speak, it is called boredom. Perhaps you have never really thought about to what extent boredom is typically something that can even be formulated in the clearest way: that one would want something else.

One is willing to eat shit, but not always the same. Those are kinds of alibis, already formulated alibis, already symbolized of this, which is this essential relation with something else. I would like to end on that. You might think that all of a sudden I am falling into romanticism and vague melancholy. You see it: desire, claustration, wakefulness—I was almost going to tell you prayer while I was at it! Why not? Boredom, where does it go, where does it slip?

But no. What I want to draw your attention to is these various manifestations of the presence of something else in that—as you reflect on it—they are institutionalized.

You can make a classification of all human formations insofar as they establish men wherever they go and everywhere. What are called collective formations can be classified according to the satisfaction they provide to these different modes of relation to something else.

As soon as a man arrives somewhere, he does foolish things, that is to say, the place where desire truly lies. As soon as he arrives somewhere, he waits for something: a better world, a future world.

He is there, he stays awake, he waits for the revolution, but above all—and above all, as soon as he arrives somewhere—it is exceedingly important that all his activities exude boredom. In other words, an activity only begins to become serious when what constitutes it, that is to say generally regularity, has become perfectly boring.

And in particular, think of everything which, in your analytic practice, is very precisely made so that you will be bored by it. That is everything. A great part, at least, of the prescriptions, what are called technical rules to be observed by the analyst, are at their core nothing other than to give this occupation all the guarantees of what is called its professional standard.

If you look closely at the bottom of things, you will realize that it is insofar as they create, maintain, and keep at the very heart the function of boredom. This is in some way a little introduction that does not really lead you into what I will tell you next time.

Next time I will take things up again to show you precisely that it is at the level of this Other as such that the dialectic of the signifier is situated, and how it is from there that it addresses the function, the incidence, the precise pressure, the inductive effect of the Name-of-the-Father as such.